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Someone up there must have seen what was intended. His hawk-shriek and hawk-stoop were ended by a La
“So!” rumbled Van Rijn. “They make happy fun games after all. We see about this!”
He broke into an elephantine trot, whirling the great mallet over his head. A slingstone bounced off his leather-decked abdomen, an arrow ripped along one cheek, blowgun darts pincushioned his double cuirass. He got a boost from two winged guards, up the sheer ladderless bulkhead of the forecastle. Then he was in among the defenders.
“Je maintien drai!” he bawled, and stove in the head of the nearest Drak’ho. “God sent the right!” he shouted, stamping on the shaft of a rake that clawed after him. “From, from, Kristme
Wace and the La
Down on the lower decks, ballistae began to thump, catapults sang and other flamethrowers licked. A party from the ice ship reassembled one of their wooden machine guns and poured darts at the last Drak’ho counterassault.
A female shape ran from the forecastle. “It’s our husbands they kill!” she shrieked. “Destroy them!”
Van Rijn leaped off the upper deck, a three-meter fall. Planks thundered and groaned when he hit them. Puffing, waving his arms, he got ahead of the frantic creature. “Get back!” he yelled in her own language. “Back inside! Shoo! Scat! Want to leave your cubs unprotected? I eat young Drak’honai! With horseradish!”
She wailed and scuttled back to shelter. Wace let out a gasp. His skin was sodden with sweat. It had not been too serious a danger, perhaps… in theory, a female mob could have been massacred under the eyes of its young… but who could bring himself to that? Not Eric Wace, certainly. Better give up and take one’s spear thrust like a gentleman.
He realized, then, that the raft was his.
Smoke still thickened the air too much for him to see very well what was going on elsewhere. Now and then, through a breach in it, appeared some vision: a raft set unquenchably afire, abandoned; an ice vessel, cracked, dismasted, arrow-swept, still bleakly slugging it out; another La
It had been perfectly clear, he thought — Van Rijn had said it bluntly enough to Trolwen and the Council — that the smaller, less well equipped, virtually untrained La
He looked up. Beyond the spars and lines, where the haze did not reach, heaven lay unbelievably cool. The formations of war, weaving in and about, were so far above him that they looked like darting swallows.
Only after minutes did his inexpert eye grasp the picture.
With most of his force down among the rafts, Trolwen was ridiculously outnumbered in the air as soon as Delp arrived. On the other hand, Delp’s folk had been flying for hours to get here; they were no match individually for well-rested La
So it went, for some timeless time in the wind under the High Summer sun. Wace lost himself, contemplating the terrible beauty of death winged and disciplined. Van Rijn’s voice pulled him grudgingly back to luckless unflying huma
“Wake up! Are you making dreams, maybe, like you stand there with your teeth hanging out and flapping in the breeze? Lightnings and Lucifer! If we want to keep this raft, we have to make some use with it, by damn. You boss the battery here and I go tell the helmsman what to do. So!” He huffed off, like an ancient steam locomotive in weight and noise and sootiness.
They had beaten off every attempt at recapture, until the expelled crew went wrathfully up to join Delp’s legions. Now, awkwardly handling the big sails, or ordered protestingly below to the sweeps, Van Rijn’s gang got their new vessel into motion. It grunted its way across a roiled, smoky waste of water, until a Drak’ho craft loomed before it. Then the broadsides cut loose, the arrows went like sleet, and crew locked with crew in troubled air midway between the thuttering rafts.
Wace stood his ground on the foredeck, directing the fire of its banked engines: stones, quarrels, bombs, oil-streams, hurled across a few meters to shower splinters and char wood as they struck. Once he organized a bucket brigade, to put out the fire set by an enemy hit. Once he saw one of his new catapults, and its crew, smashed by a two-ton rock, and forced the survivors to lever that stone into the sea and rejoin the fight. He saw how sails grew tattered, yards sagged drunkenly, bodies heaped themselves on both vessels after each clumsy round. And he wondered, in a dim part of his brain, why life had no more sense, anywhere in the known universe, than to be forever tearing itself.
Van Rijn did not have the quality of crew to win by sheer bombardment, like a neolithic Nelson. Nor did he especially want to try boarding still another craft; it was all his little tyro force could do to man and fight this one. But he pressed stubbornly in, holding the helmsmen to their collision course, going belowdecks himself to keep exhausted La
Then horns hooted among the Drak’honai, their sweeps churned water and they broke from their place in the Fleet’s formation to disengage.
Van Rijn let them go, vanishing into the hazed masts and cordage that reached for kilometers around him. He stumped to the nearest hatch, went down through the poopdeck cabins and so out on the main deck. He rubbed his hands and chortled. “Aha! We gave him a little scare, eh, what say? He’ll not come near any of our boats soon again, him!”
“I don’t understand, councilor,” said Angrek, with immense respect. “We had a smaller crew, with far less skill. He ought to have stayed put, or even moved in on us. He could have wiped us out, if we didn’t abandon ship altogether.”
“Ah!” said Van Rijn. He wagged a sausagelike finger. “But you see, my young and i